Disaster recovery planning

A documented structured approach.

Given your organisations’ dependencies on IT to run operations, a documented structured approach with instructions on how to respond to unplanned events is critical.

vCIO service from SevenC Computing will ensure a step by step plan is in place that consists of the necessary precautions to minimise the effects of a disaster and ensure the business can continue to operate or quickly resume mission critical functions.

This process starts with an analyses of business processes and continuity needs.

The correct strategy will then be implemented, that will define the organisations plans for responding to an incident.

In determining the correct strategy for your business, the following assessment and factors will be considered.

Budget
Resources – people and physical facilities
Managements position on risks
Technology
Data
Suppliers

Checklist

Establish the scope of the actual requirement
Gather relevant network infrastructure documentation
Identify the most serious threats and vulnerabilities, and the most critical assets
Review the history of unplanned incidents and outages, and how they where handled
Identify current DR strategies
Identify the emergency response team
Management review and approval of the plan
Test the plan
Update the plan
Implement DR plan audit

Having involvement at all levels, from Management to entry level employees will increase the value of the DR Plan.

Types of disaster discovery plans

Virtualised disaster recovery plan

Virtualisation provides opportunities to implement disaster recovery in a more efficient way, a virtualised environment can spin up new virtual machines within minutes.

Network disaster recovery plan

These are plans that involve the recovery of the network.

Cloud disaster recovery plan

Ranging from file backups in the cloud to complete replication with automated failover.

Data centre recovery plan

Key elements of data center DR is planning, analysing key components such as building location – power systems and protection, security systems and office space, and addressing a broad range of possible scenarios.